Pumping Irony

Perhaps I’m retarded but how [BEEP] exactly does one go about [BEEP] talking on their Droid, iPhone or other [BEEP] touch screen phone without it [BEEP] thinking your face is pressing random [BEEP] buttons on the dial pad, or [BEEP] worse, pressing the End Call button right in the middle of the conversa-[CLICK]?

I’ve been in dire need of a new laptop for some time now. I’ve actually drooled over several netbooks because they fit my requirements when it comes to size and weight. Their downside is they’re extremely underpowered. They can barely handle YouTube, and forget Hulu or Netflix or even YouTube HD videos. Games? Only if you consider 3-10fps to be playable. Gaming isn’t an extremely high priority but I’d like something that could handle the odd MMO or RTS to break the monotony for those times when I have a lot of time in hotels and an unsociable crew. In fact, most netbooks use the 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, which is the same speed as my 7 year-old Inspiron 600m I’m using. I can watch a YouTube video if I don’t have much else going on. Why spend $300+ to essentially buy a lighter version of my laptop?

Enter Alienware’s M11x laptop. With an 11′ screen, it has the size I’m after — something that can easily squeeze into my Purdy Neat Stuff rollaboard. It’s also 4.5 pounds, which is unfortunately heavier than similar-sized netbooks and only .8 lbs lighter than this crappy 600m I’m using. The power supply + cables for the 600m feels like it’s roughly another pound, and while 6.3lbs doesn’t sound like much, when you’re adding it to an already-heavy bag and lugging it around for days at a time, believe me it’s noticeable compared to the times I don’t bring it along. One of my AGE friends, @HeartbreakRidge, recently picked up an M11x, loves it, and says the power supply is pretty small and light.

Near as I can tell, the M11x can reasonably (in the vicinity of 30fps) run some of the games I’m playing at the moment, such as Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes, Runes of Magic. Not sure about LOTRO and I highly doubt Age of Conan would run tolerably on the lowest settings.

That’s kinda the catch. Due to their high price (my opinion) I don’t upgrade laptops very often and try to squeeze every ounce of usability before my patience finally wears thin. So while it’s all good and fine that it will play a 3 year-old RTS like Company of Heroes, or a free MMO like Runes of Magic, I’m leery of jumping on board the M11x and it’s Dual Core setup when I feel Alienware should have (or likely has in development) built this small lightweight laptop with an i3- or better CPU setup instead; something that is a little more scalable and modern and should hold up better over the next 5+ years before I will probably feel like spending the money to replace it.

I’ve learned my lesson the hard way repeatedly when it comes to technology: Just buy it and don’t look back, because the second it appeared on store shelves it was already obsolete. But other parts aren’t as expensive as say, buying new laptops every year or two. I only use it when I’m working, but I want to feel like I got my money’s worth out of it when it’s all said and done.

Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!

Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.

This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.

So yesterday I’m enjoying the new PC, it’s noticeably faster overall and games were running faster, yet I’ll admit to being disappointed that I wasn’t seeing quite the speed increase in the two MMO’s. I could tell they were running smoother but I was only getting +10-ish frames per second more than the previous PC. That just didn’t sound right. Not to mention I have a DX11 OS and DX10 video card, yet the DX10 option was greyed-out in both games. Something was amiss. I know AoC is a resource hog but I was expecting to be able to crank up the graphic settings more than I was able to. Didn’t stop me from playing several hours and it was far more stable (from a playability, not technical, standpoint) than it had been but there was still a deep-felt sense of disappointment of “nearly $1,000 and this is all I have to show for it?”

So I made a few comments along those lines on Twitter yesterday and some of the gang went about trying to find out specifically how to enable my DX10 options. Unfortunately none of them worked, for a very special level of noobness on my part, but I want to specifically thank Openedge1, BlueKae and Avery78 for their help looking into the problem. Openedge was even digging through the LOTRO forums looking for solutions — and he utterly despises LOTRO and everything about it — so a special thanks for your efforts, Edge. We’d covered everything from multiple installs of the ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers, multiple installs of the DirectX Web Setup, checking compatibility settings on the .exe files, and checking a few configuration files, all to no avail.

With great horror and shame, I finally discovered the problem. As I said, this was an entirely new realm of noobness and hell, it’s just embarrassing. Edge tried to get me to fess up and I said “no way!” Then thinking about it, not only does it give me an excuse to write something on my somewhat-neglected blog here but also it’s healthy to be able to laugh at yourself. So here’s the brief history of the past 3 months wrestling with this beast.

I placed the order for the parts on December 1 but it was probably the third week of December before I had a chance to assemble everything and run into the first hitch. It all started with the motherboard’s power LED lighting up but nothing else would turn on. No fans, nothing, and it certainly wasn’t going to consider booting. Turns out I’d had the cables to the power switch, etc. installed vertically like they were on the previous motherboard rather than horizontally. Then again, the manual for my previous motherboard had illustrations and the new one does not, so it took a couple weeks to discover that mistake. It’s mid-January at this point.

Now we’ve got full power to the system. Pressing the power button brought life to all sorts of fans and LED’s and… that was all. No signal to the monitor and from the lack of any sounds other than fans (ie. hard drives, etc.) the system didn’t seem to actually be doing anything resembling booting up. Argh! Is the video card faulty? The monstrous fan came on so it’s getting power so perhaps the GPU is bad? Or is it the motherboard that’s malfunctioning? Maybe it’s just the PCI-X slot? Unlike the other parts, I ordered the video card — an ATI Radeon 4890 HD (my first ATI ever) — back in July after reading Openedge gush about it. So now my freshly-opened video card was well beyond the 30 day return point and I was going to have to spend more cash having it replaced if it came to that.

Over the next couple weeks I did a little troubleshooting [make a note of this, it will be important soon] I learned that there was an extremely high probability that I was one of several customers who ordered this particular motherboard and CPU as a combo package from Newegg, only to discover that the BIOS had not been updated to actually support the CPU yet, preventing the system from booting at all. Hey, that sounds familiar, no? It’s mid-February now, and I spent nearly a week playing phone tag with people from Asus but finally having them send me a replacement BIOS chip (free but I had to pay shipping). The Fedex tracker says it’s going to arrive the first day of my next trip so I took the morning off work so the chip wouldn’t be sitting outside. I hung around the condo all morning but lunch time I was starving so I ran out for 20 minutes and left a note on the door for the Fedex guy. Anyone care to guess when he shows up? Yep! Exactly while I’m out. Oh, and unlike UPS, Fedex pretty much refuses to just leave your packages for you, even if you sign a note for them. Seriously, do they just expect everyone to stay holed up in their homes every second of the day awaiting their arrival with bated breath? I called the support number and in between ripping the girl a new one was informed that no, the driver could not simply come back (he’s only been gone a few minutes, grrrrr!) and I’ll need to sign the door sticker card he left in order for him to leave it. Great! Now I’ve taken unpaid time off work for no reason and the BIOS chip will be sitting outside anyway!

So, I get home Sunday night and sure enough, there was a Fedex package waiting. I dig into things Monday and learn I don’t have space to do the small screwdriver trick to remove the old BIOS chip. I’m going to need to buy an IC removal tool. Crap. I drove to three different stores and no one has one for sale. Crap. So I lugged the case to my car and drove to SmartPC and paid the owner $15 to replace the BIOS for me. Just to be certain it would work, he offered to power the system up to make sure I had a monitor signal and the motherboard would attempt to boot. Sounded good to me. So he plugs in the power cable to the video card then lugged it over to the monitor. I told him there were two power inputs, not just one. He stopped and double-checked and told me no, just the one. A little red flag went up in the back of my mind because I remembered full well that the 4890 had two PCI-E plugs, but hey, he’s the owner of a shop that does nothing but build computers; he should know his stuff right? Sure enough, the BIOS update was all it took so I happily paid the man, shrugged off his jokes about how messy my PSU was (seriously people, no matter how good the price may be, do not ever get a non-modular PSU) drove back home and excitedly installed Windows 7 which brings us back to the beginning of this article and trying to discover why DX10 options were disabled in my brand-new PC.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said I had attempted to troubleshoot why there was no signal to the monitor? Part of that troubleshooting involved replacing the new ATI 4890 with my old Nvidia 7950GT to see if a card I knew worked would have the same problem. Partly because I was still wondering if I was going to have to send my 4890 back for replacement and mostly out of disgust and dismay for the whole situation, I never put the 4890 back in! By the time the BIOS was replaced I had completely forgotten about it and thought it was good to go, 4890 and all. That explains the red flag for the guy saying my video card only had one power input. Naturally, having a DX9 card in the PC guarantees that all DX10 options will be disabled as well…

Like I said, that was a whole new level of noobishness!

All is well now. The 4890 is installed, and DX10 has become available. I haven’t gotten around to installing image editing and FTP software yet so I’ll have to wait until next week or so (rough schedule this month so “or so” is likely) to post screenshots.

I fired up LOTRO and… honestly couldn’t tell any difference. I thought there were supposed to be all kinds of shaders for even better-looking water but it looked the same as it has since launch. I finally noticed that the branches of all the trees in Lothlorien cast shadows on the ground and followed the light sources, which doesn’t happen in DX9. However, in short order every fan in my case was running on overdrive. So, for now, back to DX9 for LOTRO. It isn’t worth sitting next to a turbojet engine just for tree shadows and extra-hitchy movement through Middle Earth. Seriously, what is with that game’s engine? They really need to look at changing the tech for pre-caching textures, etc.

Then I logged into Age of Conan. Character select screen shows up and of course I have an even higher framerate while my Bear Shaman impatiently shifts from foot to foot waiting for me to log him into the world. So I oblige him. I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped onto the desk. This is my first time seeing what DX10 can really do live and in-person. Welcome to 2007 right? Whatever! Age of Conan was already a good-looking game in DX9 but had the type of art and textures that could look fairly ugly at times when some options were scaled down. DX10 is night and day, and Age of Conan’s graphics truly shine. Performance is noticeably better with the default DX10 settings and I’m sure with tweaking I can get even better framerate without detracting too much from the gorgeous visuals.

So a year after I started saying I’d build a new PC, 8 months after buying the video card, and 3 months after initially assembling the new PC… I have a new PC!

I still haven’t gotten the new PC working yet. No idea what’s wrong with it. The motherboard LED is lit, showing it has power, but the thing just won’t turn on. I thought it was a broken PSU but I did what the Corsair tech told me and the PSU is functioning properly. Someone on Twitter — @BlueKae I think? — suggested I reset the motherboard. Other than that,  SmartPC charges $59 for diagnostics and repair.

The thing is, I’m just not motivated to actually fool with the damned thing! Maybe it’s the whole getting older gradually maturing thing, but I’ve really become spoiled by the 360. I never have to worry about new drivers, buggy third-party services that crash the system, virii or malware, etc. I just turn it on and it works, and everyone I game with gets the same performance.

I’ve always built my own PC’s but this time around, I just wasn’t into it. Not that I’d necessarily be into buying a prefab PC with specs I don’t approve of. I just want to turn the thing on and it works. I’ve lost the thrill of constantly tweaking, working for every ounce I could get out of the PC, and generally jumping through hoops. If I wanted to do all that I’d still be using Linux for games.

The other issue in the back of my mind is the RSI I keep harping about. When I was back in LOTRO and Battlefield 2142 for a couple weeks in November before my PC died, I could feel the mouse wrist tingling after only 30 minutes or less. Hell, even while writing this or doing anything at all on the PC if I don’t make a constant effort to keep my mouse wrist elevated off the desk, I start getting those aching tingles pretty quickly.

The main thing about MMOG’s I miss? Chatting. Kin-mates or guild-mates and friends first, general chat second. I’ve never allowed things to get as bad as they were in the height of my WoW addiction where I’d login because “I just had to” but I had absolutely nothing to do so I’d shift into kitty form and auto-run laps around Ironforge while chatting. But still, in most MMO’s I find that I don’t necessarily play the game all the time; there’s a lot of time idling (or just running, and running, and running) while chatting. Sometimes I just read the chat while running. (Note: riding a mount = running in this respect.) Maybe find a pretty view in the landscape, and pan the camera around, while chatting.

It’s nice, but all that chatting — not to mention using the mouse to move or pan the camera — means my wrist is at constant risk of firing up the RSI again. It’s hard to get motivated to get a new PC working when I know I’ll want to login to LOTRO to see the better performance, better graphics, etc. then spend all day and night running, panning and chatting my way to the doctor again…

I really wish someone would get a fun and high-quality MMOG on the 360 already. One that was built for a console from the ground-up, not a PC MMOG trimmed down because that just won’t work. If a console Age of Conan, for example, ditched the RPG hotbar combat and went to a more action-context-based system (think Batman: Arkham Asylum) I’d be all.over.it!

My Year in Gaming

2009 was, to a degree, a rough patch in gaming for me. I started the year off with Mines of Moria then decided I was due for a total MMO break, which lasted four months, where I mostly got some quality Guild Wars action going with the new guild and alliance there, and just some PvMP in LOTRO. A couple months and burnout set in again and I’ve actually been on MMO break the rest of the year other than a few quick stops in LOTRO and a few weeks with Age of Conan before my PC went on the fritz. I actually intended on restarting LOTRO a month or two ago but the whole PC thing put the kibosh on that.

Luckily, my 360 came through and man, oh man was 2009 ever the time for major high-quality console games! Some of my absolute favorites from this year are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins, and The Saboteur but it doesn’t take but a quick check at my Gamertag profile to see the huge list of games that saw a lot of playtime this year. I’m semi-tempted to add Modern Warfare 2 to the list but I’m still undecided on that one. I can at least admit to having some fun with the multiplayer even though I typically can’t take it for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time.

For next year I actually hope the release cycle slows down. I haven’t been keeping tabs on the games for 2010 at all since I bought so many this year that I haven’t finished yet. All I know is Mass Effect 2 is soon and Bad Company 2 in March. Otherwise I hope to get back into MMO’s this year; primarily LOTRO with some GW and perhaps AoC on the side. I might — might — finally shut the hell up and actually give EVE a brief shot. Undecided though. I’ve seen it being played and it didn’t strike me as anything I’d enjoy actually playing myself. As I write this, I am hard-pressed to think of a single upcoming MMO that I’m looking forward to, however. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t count since that will be a 2011 game. Possibly Black Prophecy, mostly because I have a sinking feeling that Jumpgate Evolution will end up being WoW in Space with circle-jerk combat. Frankly, Black Prophecy might be a circle-jerk game too, I really don’t know enough about it yet but it’s from the guys who made Neocron — a cool, though flawed as hell, first-person cyberpunk MMO — and the little I’ve seen gives it more of a “darker” feel than JGE, which I think I’d enjoy more. Every other MMO that comes to mind is just another Diku-MMO with yet another pretty, fluffy layer add onto all the layers already devised over the past 5+ years to mask the rotten stench of the broken Diku core.

Honestly, at this point being mostly away from MMO’s it’s been very refreshing to be able to just enjoy gaming without being so genre- and platform-elitist. If I’d sequestered myself in my man-cave with the PC limiting myself to MMO’s — which themselves are extremely limited as games just for the sake of having all those players per server — I would have missed out on some wonderful experiences elsewhere. I suspect most of you could give a crap when I blog about non-MMO games but I always hold that little vestige of hope that if you bother to read my posts, you’re a little more open-minded and not so dead-set on MMO-way or the Highway.

The Best of Intentions

We’d planned on my girlfriend coming to my overnight in Newport News for New Year’s Eve. Everything looked good, I had her listed round-trip all the way here and home again. Then today arrives with bad weather along the East Coast and especially in the Northeast. Flights to Newport News and Norfolk were delayed and downsized so that filled everything up and left no room for non-rev standby passengers so she ended up flying back home after several hours trying. She’s never come on any of my trips or even a single overnight during a trip with me, so I was looking forward to seeing her and spending the night with her for a change. Not to mention it’s a holiday and I very rarely manage to get a holiday off or see family or friends. But just that she was willing to fly up to our hub and put up with all the hassles and passengers — though I must say that New Years’ passengers are much nicer than Christmas passengers; those people are downright evil and retarded — just to end up flying right back home, means a lot to me. I arrived shortly before she headed to her flight home so I at least got to see her for a few minutes, which made my day. No, that made my whole trip! December’s schedule has been rough and I’ve been more exhausted, on edge and moody than usual as a result but today after seeing her smile and sneaking a quick kiss wishing her well as I left for my next flight, everything was ok in my little world for awhile. Happy New Year, I love ya babe!

You, Me, and PI.net

First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to those of you who still stop by or have kept this blog in your RSS reader despite a very obvious decline in my writing. So many of us get on our ADHD high-horses and delete any blog that doesn’t update every couple days, minimum, so those of you who have kept me in your feed list, just know that holds meaning to me.

Obviously I decided to keep the server running. I was all but decided on shutting it down, even if it were temporary, but I simply didn’t have the time to handle backing up the blog, images, etc. so it was easier to just shell out the $100 than to lose it all like happened with my previous blog. Offhand, I don’t necessarily know that I plan to increase the number of posts per month, but we’ll see what happens. But I do plan on continuing my pattern of console and PC gaming; MMO and “real” video games. So I hope you’re all ok with that!

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season so far, and that you’re having a great New Year’s Eve tonight. I look forward to beginning not only the new year but the next decade in the 21st century.

Besides, this is the year we finally get to make contact with those Monoliths before they turn Jupiter supernova and tell us to colonize all its moons except Europa, right? Right?

I think I finally “get” Twitter. After continually being accused of “arguing” over Twitter I took a step back and scrolled as far as my history would allow me and what I discovered is that everyone I follow tweets random, opinionless “stuff.” Just little mini-headlines or newsbytes, at best a 140-character equivalent of a “Now Playing” status on a media player or IM client. The only “social” interaction is perhaps asking for brief advice and getting a few replies, or someone making a completely opinionless tweet acknowledging someone else’s completely opinionless tweet. Obviously I had never noticed that before; that type of “interaction” is foreign to me.

After so many years on BBS’ back in the day, then GEnie, then years on IRC having discussions and sharing opinions, now we all have blogs which by their very definition are there for us to write our opinions and for commenters to also share their opinions on what we just wrote our opinion on, I find it tragically sad that apparently Twitter is most assuredly not for having any opinion on. I didn’t get the memo on that, but everyone can rest assured that “get it” now.

From now on, I’ll just let Raptr, GamerDNA or whatever handle the bulk of my tweets since they are all automated by a script and therefore do not have a person with feelings behind them who may be tempted to share his opinion in a, you know, “social” medium. If I dare make a manual tweet, I shall endeavor to remove any trace of emotion or opinion behind it so that it remains “random stuff” and is therefore acceptable to the delicate Twittersphere.

In other news, as we get closer and closer to my deadline for keeping this server up (4 days to decide), behavior like this from the bloggers I respect the most just brings me closer and closer to shutting this whole thing down. This is all supposed to be enjoyable, not something that brings me stress or leaves me with hurt feelings.

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

Couldn’t resist throwing a little Beatles in there, especially since Tipa has been on a recent anti-Beatles rampage.

I’m in need of advice from any networking gurus out there.

For quite some time I’ve been experiencing random disconnects from my ISP, Comcast. Sometimes it’s a quick disconnect but resynch’s fairly quickly and I’ll only see a brief error trying to view a website or a brief period of lag in an online game. More frequently, however, even if the cable modem itself resynch’s quickly I still have no internet — DNS error — until I reboot my cable modem and router.

Frequent disconnects while gaming affects not only me, but everyone in the game with me, and it only takes a couple forced resets due to a disconnect to get tempers flaring.

I replaced my aging Linksys DOCSIS 1.0 modem last week with a Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 modem. I also replaced my Linksys WRT54G router with a Netgear Rangemax Dual-Band N router. Still the disconnects, loss of DNS, whatever is going on, is occuring.

At this point I’m inclined to think it’s Comcast. Anyone have experience with Comcast to have an idea what I should be asking for help with? I’ve heard they have different tiers of tech support; if that’s true, any suggestions for getting to the top tier guys immediately? I don’t have much time at home this month to be sitting on hold and wasting time with scripted “Is the computer plugged into the wall?” type questions.

This month’s GameInformer magazine has an interview with Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame, where he talks a bit about videogame violence.

My favorite snippet (since Syp already has dibs on “Quote of the Day”) is:

The truth of the matter is there have been so many popular songs that have been about peace and love, and they haven’t turned the world into complete peace and love. Violence still happens. So the bad news is, you can’t just put out “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles and get world peace, and the good news is that first-person shooters don’t turn people into killers.

The topic of violence in games and society continues for three paragraphs. Good stuff, and similar arguments to what gamers and anyone who knows what they’re actually talking about uses to counter the media and clueless conservatives who think all gamers are sociopaths in the making, but it’s nice to hear it coming from a celebrity and non-gamer too.

Sorry, this is not a post discussing the life-lessons of the 1986 Ralph Machio movie of the same name, although I will freely admit to owning the MP3 of the “Head-cuttin’ Duel” by Steve Vai and Ry Cooder from the movie. Good stuff there!

No, my lease is nearly up at Lunarpages.com for this site. I’m looking at how much I blog these days, the likelihood that will pick up next year, since I only plan on playing LOTRO and maybe a scant handful of other MMOG’s. I can transfer the LOTRO-specific blogging over to My.LOTRO if I want to. I’ll keep my domain name because I like it, but I’m very much undecided if I want to continue paying over $100 per year for this server space when I’m not using it as much anymore. I can easily save the money and move the blog over to WordPress or Blogger and transfer the domain name.

I don’t know. December 25 is the day I have to pay Lunarpages if I decide to keep the site here. Guess I have some decisions to make in the meantime…

It’s been years and years since I’ve liked this holiday in the slightest, mostly because of getting sick from eating too many olives and chocolate-covered raisins as a kid one Thanksgiving. But still, being thankful for various people and aspects in your life is a good notion. I wasn’t planning on writing anything like this at all when I clicked the link to my blog, but here is a quickie off-the-cuff (you have no idea how off-the-cuff this is!) list of what I am thankful for in 2009.

• My family and friends. I may not get to see you often in person (my mother raked me over the coals that I have to work both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year — same as every year, mom! — and haven’t been home in over 2 years) but I love you all very much!
• My girlfriend, (anonymous code name: L) who never ceases to be amazing and inspirational on so many levels. Love you, sweetie!
• In light of the high unemployment rate in the US, I am thankful that I have a decent-paying job at all, because many people unfortunately do not.
• My new subwoofer and I are thankful that the condo directly underneath mine is currently vacant! We’ve been enjoying that fact; oh yes we have!

Anyway, I wished all my friends, readers, fellow bloggers and tweeters a Happy Thanksgiving, but I wanted to have it here as well. Hope all of you had a great holiday and that you all have something to be thankful for this year.